1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed generally to a method for controlling operation of a supply chain management software tool, and in particular, to a method of using a software “poller” module to initiate and monitor operation of one or more computerized tasks or operational slices.
2. Description of Related Art
Many current applications employ “pollers”, subroutines or sub-applications, that generally status the on-going activity being processed. The pollers deal with monitoring the processing of computerized tasks. For example, a poller may read a directory searching for the existence of a certain, predetermined task. If the poller detects the predetermined task, the task may be copied to a data directory and processed appropriately, untarred, unencrypted, and the like. Supply Capability Engine (SCE) applications generally require pollers that process tasks.
Polling a computer processor yields information regarding the status of the application software, and allows a user to implement instruction based on that current status. In prior art designs, pollers were first implemented as hardware interrupts. One type of hardware interrupt was described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,034,347 issued to Geoffrey Probert, Jr., entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING A MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEM.” The Probert design taught a computer polling circuit and a separate memory polling circuit for controlling, respectively, the computer access to the memory sections and the memory section access to the computers. Each poller comprises a binary counter and clock for incrementing the counter. As the binary counter in the computer poller is incremented, for example, each computer is sequentially interrogated to determine whether or not it requires access to a memory section. If a memory request is detected, the counter then provides additional timing pulses and the requesting computer is given access to the requested memory section over the time multiplexed bus. The memory poller operates in a similar fashion. Eventually, pollers evolved chiefly into software applications.
It is known generally in the prior art to use pollers to control execution of computerized tasks, and such pollers are, in particular, known in the art of supply chain management software. However, the prior art has not taught or suggested providing a poller having the capability to execute multiple operational slices at one time. Moreover, it has not been known in the art to provide a poller having the ability to monitor a given slice while the slice is executing, or to determine if the duration of execution of the slice is outside a predetermined execution time.